They could have written a scene like that to replace the one in which everyone pauses in the middle of a massive emergency so that they can listen to McCoy explaining, apropos nothing and to nobody in particular, that he seems to have invented a resurrection serum.

Not only was Khan a beloved villain, but his reappearance in WoK ties into the general theme of reckoning with ageing, mortality and the consequences of past mistakes which give that film its dramatic heft.

The main problem with the whole Khan reveal in Into Darkness wasn’t that everyone knew it already. The problem was that it didn’t matter. I recall some reviewer at the time being somewhat baffled that the film’s big twist was that a man’s name was different from what he had originally said it was.

One the one hand, I have no time for the sort of ‘fan culture’ that feels a popular franchise is ‘ruined’ if it doesn’t pander to their elaborate understanding of its backstory or provide the idealised story they’d always imagined in their heads. Its light commercial entertainment guys, it’s never going to love you…

I feel like Pynchon is the main example.

I think you might have left out ‘I am a White Man with a Whimsical Name, and the Series of Outlandish Events that are About to Happen are Deeply Emblematic of the Human Condition’. It’s hard to miss these because they are usually a thousand or so pages long. I have one that I use to prop up a monitor.

The Val introduction was all very well, but can we talk about how hard the film tried to gaslight us into the idea that ‘nameless South London dude who can turn up anywhere he likes with equipment and aircraft’ was a much-loved supporting character with a well-established flirty rapport with the hero rather than one…

Streaming might make it less accessible, listening-wise. The thing with Trout Mask Replica is that it’s peppered with (relatively) conventional folk/blues tracks (The Dust Blows Forward..., China Pig etc.) that help you get your bearings as to what’s going on, musically speaking. The madder stuff is for the most part…

Ehhh...I mean, I think on my first rewatch I remember thinking it was better than I remembered at the time. And it does have some solid setpieces beyond the freeway scene. But it really also has these incredible weak spots. The rave was just amazingly ill-conceived. The Merovingian is just tiresome. And don’t forget…

Oh no, I still catch it in the classic ambient way that the average R4 listener does (i.e. sort of pottering around on a Sunday morning while the omnibus chunters away in the background), so yeah, I’ve picked up on all that.

I can see their point, to be honest. On rewatches it always really strikes me how hard they were (or at least looked to be) keying off former Yugoslavia as a model in seasons 1 and 2, and a DS9 series based on that could have been super-interesting.

Oh, I agree that DS9 is the strongest of all the series throughout - it even made Lwaxana Troi mildly bearable. But the whole Bajoran internal politics/Federation membership plot thread was underwritten and somewhat boring, and early series sex pest Julian Bashir is just unwatchable. Chacun a son gout, I guess, but…

Honestly, are there any other genres of film in which actors are expected to produce, at will, a considered position on the elaborate theories that the audience have developed about the detailed backstories of the characters they are playing? Or where aficionadoes feel so strongly that the creators of the stories…

Yeah, I can imagine you could translate it into sonic trickery - someone turns out to be doing a really good impersonation of someone else, or the the ambient sound leads you to imagine you’re in a different environment to the one you’re actually in. Hopefully they’ve been that sort of clever.

In the UK, the public broadcaster runs a fairly universally popular speech radio station (BBC Radio 4) which drops new comedy and drama (including a hilariously dull agricultural soap opera which has been running since the 1950s) on a daily basis so it’s a bit more familiar over here. They’ve just recently started…

But even the halfway good stuff was marred by the sheer forgettability of the cast. I’ve populated tax returns with more compelling and richly drawn characters than the crew of that ship.

Yeah, I’m mid-watch and uneasily aware that things tail off as most of the cast gets sidelined and we set about turning the Borg into pantomime villains in earnest (although I will blame First Contact for starting that particular rot). But as far as I’m concerned nothing, not even S2 (which has its moments, although…

When she plugged into the cube and became Borg Queen for a day I was briefly excited about all the awesome possibilities for where they might take that, before realising the people I was dealing with and bracing myself for them to sort of half-arsedly drop it and wander off to something else like a bored and not…

Not just ‘turned him into an android’ but, even more bafflingly ‘turned him into an android in a way that solved an immediate problem but otherwise somehow wouldn’t make any difference.’

“To me, Star Trek is Star Trek. It makes me happy.”